About

These stories were produced by UQ students over 10 weeks with the support of the School of Journalism and Communication AfterImages Team.

The theme of these Master Classes is to explore the importance of family relationships, focusing on the responsibilities and the privileges that remain central to the concept of ‘Family’ (even as our understandings of that notion become more diverse and inclusive).

Catalogue Introduction

DR PRADIP THOMAS Acting Head, School of Journalism and Communication

The AfterImages project focuses on fostering visual storytelling in students that excelled in the UQ School of Journalism and Communication’s first-year Introduction to Visual Communication course.

I am privileged to write this piece for a catalogue that showcases the talent and creativity of students working with the visual medium. The photographs featured in this catalogue, the exhibition, and website offer an extraordinary range of visual interpretations by students on the theme of family.

These images convey a whole range of emotions on the family as a human condition, shaped by happiness and joy as much as by solitude and sadness. These are wonderfully crafted images that are both poignant and profound, for they reflect the frailty of family, while also celebrating the energy that shapes, maintains, and reinforces the intimate relationships that are at the very core of family. Students were privileged to observe their family, or be welcomed into other families, throughout the semester, and the photo narratives that emerged reveal everyday lives, the banality and routines, as well as the moments that make the family the bedrock of community.

It was the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who said that “in the beginning is the relation and the relation is the cradle of life”—a fact that has been so wonderfully and evocatively portrayed through these images. While the make-up of the family has changed over the years, it continues to sustain and give meaning. Our students have captured slices of every-day life, textured, granular, life in all its beauty and simplicity, that now become part of the memory of family.

Background

In 1955, a very important and influential exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before touring the world. That exhibition, entitled ‘The Family of Man’, was a major work of visual journalism that attempted to express universal aspects of human culture (with a particular centrality of ‘the family’). 70 years on, our notions of family have shifted and evolved into more plural, inclusive understandings of these core relationships. While the original exhibition certainly explored diverse cultures across the world, it upheld a very traditional definition of ‘family’. This year, The AfterImages Master Class series re-examines the notion of family.